Grooming the Flock
by John Bigboote
Summary: Nobody calls me chicken.


"_Puridikutaboru."_

\- Geese Howard, King of Fighters

* * *

"Unh…"

Birdy slipped back into consciousness with the sounds of a low whirring electric motor and her own groggy moaning tickling her ear drums. Her entire body felt like it was made of solid lead and submerged in fizzing soda. She was sprawled on her side with her arms limply flopped across concrete and her legs tangled over each other. She felt a mysterious and relentlessly pleasant sensation starting somewhere in the numb void between her ribs and her pelvis and spreading through the rest of her tingling nerves. The last thing she remembered was her and Capella exchanging high kicks to each other's craniums. Her head was pounding in agony, but she had to admit her abs felt really nice.

She used the few ounces of strength she could gather to swivel the upper part of her body on to its back while her legs refused to budge. Looking straight upward, she was staring at the underside of a 10-foot wide metallic umbrella forming a sort of vanity screen between her and the bright daylight. The electrical droning was mainly coming in through her left ear, and she could feel the ground vibrating underneath her pounding head with each of the motor's revolutions. Her vision was milky, fragmented, tinted in vibrant red, and gradually getting worse. It was like she was looking through the inside a broken plasma screen. The digital swirling stars in her eyes formed the shapes of scrambled numerical digits and spelled out the phrase _"INVASION IN PROGRESS . . ."_

Her cognitive senses weren't completely with it, but she was pretty sure that message didn't belong there.

"Hgnh…"

Birdy sluggishly turned her head sideways again as she followed the titanium skeletal frame suppoting the umbrella. The source of the noise was Capella's support robot parked beside her. The stout and heavily armored Audubon used to look like a three-foot-tall Roomba. Now it looked like a nine-foot-tall Roomba with spider legs rigidly staked into the concrete road as stabilizers while an even bigger robot jellyfish expanded over its circular body. Its motor was powering a winding system of pneumatic tubes and hoses attached to a pair of exposed fluid tanks filled with glowing fruit punch. Every time the contents of the tank closest to her bubbled, the feelings of cozy rapture sweeping through Birdy's midsection intensified. Her senses were somehow dulled the same time they were exaggerated. The simple feeling of the tiny beads of sweat trickling over her relaxing muscles was multiplied a thousandfold.

Her drowsy eyes traveled downward toward the epicenter of the infectious sensations of comfort attacking her body. Instantly, she saw the metal nanoinjector that had been plugged into her navel and linked her directly to Capella's elaborate machine. The front of her laminated skintight suit had been slashed open a few inches below her breasts to make a clear path to her umbilical dimple. If she had a full sense of awareness, she would have screamed and yanked the gross thing out of her body in the moment she realized it was there. Instead, she uttered a weak "Mng" and reacted as if she was looking at an alarm clock and just wanted to snooze for five more minutes. Her paralyzed hands never moved an inch near her belly.

Capella was getting tuned up on the pavement ten feet across from her. Birdy's vision may have been scrambled, but she could still recognize those ballerina-esque shoulder blades and that scrawny boy-butt anywhere. She was looking at Capella's back, and the fact Capella's combat suit had no back to speak of left little to the imagination. There was some alternating light and dark blue fabric covering her feet up to her thighs, and everything above that was all cheeks and ridges. Another pneumatic hose was coiled over her hip and almost certainly looped down to where the front of her suit was almost certainly pried apart like Birdy's, leaving no mystery on who was connected to Audubon's second tank of glowing fluid.

So the machine had turned against its mistress. Capella had brought her little toy to Earth specifically as a way to teach Birdy how to behave more like a proper Altan. It was an official routine procedure, she said. "Surrender and lie down, Captain Altera. This is for your own good," she said. Her thinly veiled threats had spurred their latest fight that ended with them knocking each other senseless. But as they were lying across from each other in the cracked rubble of the city street after the battle was over, the mechanical referee apparently had deemed both of them to be a threat to their species and decided to act on them accordingly. It turned out they had both bargained on more than just a little bit of lint in their belly buttons, and they lost disastrously.

They were undergoing Placentralization. The injectors plugged into their navels fed them with a steady diet of nanomachines that would take over their bodies and assimilate their minds once the concentration in their bloodstream reached a certain threshold. If Birdy or Capella started moving just a little too much during the procedure, a round tranquilizers would shoot through their belly to keep them cute and easily manageable. It was a very effective way to subjugate mammals from a wide variety of planets. Unfortunately, the outcome of an Altan soldier having her body taken over and reverting to her factory settings as an automated combat doll was usually pretty grim for the offworld she was currently visiting. Their new intelligence was always a rudimentary affair with only two modes of thought: "Explore" and "Exterminate."

The side of Birdy's face remained pressed against the road as her eyes stared at Capella's back. She found herself too relaxed to even move her head. She languidly watched and counted the pulsating light rings coiling down through the tube connected to Capella and traveling to her out-of-view waist in fixed mechanical intervals. She wondered why Audubon went through all the effort of tampering its way into the front of Capella's suit when it could have just stuck the injector straight into her bare hind end.

Capella never moved a single one of her lithe muscles the whole time she was toppled on her side. If she made a sound, Birdy's sense of hearing was too muffled to pick it up. She was always facing away so Birdy couldn't tell if she was sleeping peacefully or making new ahegao memes.

"Tsutomu, we're in trouble," Birdy murmured to herself in a weakened stupor.

"_What's wrong? What's going on out there?"_ her male alter-ego replied from the back of her mind.

"I don't think I'll be able to let you inhabit my body anymore."

"_W-why?"_

"Because I'm not going to be inhabiting it, either."

Birdy sighed gently as she closed her eyes, letting the voice in her head fade away as sleep overwhelmed her.

A few minutes later, the nanoinjectors unlocked from their tender entry sites and withdrew their nozzles. The two Altans started to slowly move on the ground as they stirred back to life. Their bodies silently rose to their feet under the shade of Audubon's collector dish. Birdy's chest and Capella's cockatiel bangs bounced at attention as they straightened their postures.

They stood beside each other with matching expressions that could be read as subtly menacing or completely emotionless. Their eyes burned with strange red symbols that resembled the outline of a hawk lifting its wings. Their skin shimmered with bright red highlights that weaved and intersected in electronic grids. Audubon left them each a final parting souvenir in the form of a polished metal ring latched around their right ankle that identified them by a serial number and a commission date. It was a straightforward way to tell they had been put through some freaky microscopic alien mischief, if their glowing effects and the damaged fronts of their battlesuits didn't make it obvious enough.

The mechanical sentry retracted its spider legs and closed its metal umbrella. As it shrank down into its default mode as a miniature self-guided hover craft, it left the two Altan warriors standing in Earth's bright blue sunlight.

Birdy's and Capella's pulsing eyes scanned the industrialized habitat of glass and concrete buildings surrounding them. Their minds silently computed the best way to conquer all of it.

* * *

_Author's note: They're supposed to look like they've been heavily Geassed in case you couldn't tell._


End file.
